Rants and meanderings from a science fiction writer to his future fans, or anyone else who'll listen, for that matter.

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Mr. Hellstrøm is an average drunken profligate, cynical bastard (read: disappointed romantic), and all-round lazy crazy son-of-a-bitch out to become a cult in his own right, shamelessly promoting himself (haha, good luck with that old boy) and the book before it is even done. Nonetheless, he does have an interesting slant on things now and again, as I can testify. After all, no one knows him better than I do.

Tag Archives for beauty

There is no way to describe her. I’ve met her, now and again. I want her.
Inner worth. It has little to do with beauty in the general sense. I won’t say it has nothing to do with it, because that would be foolish. We all know the inherent attraction we find for certain people because of the way they look, but that is not what I am talking about. Yeah, she may have style, she may have looks, but that ain’t enough. She may even have an operative brain. That helps. A lot.
Maybe that’s the most important thing: an operative brain. A nice ass helps, though. Ahh… what shall I say? Both, please?
There are so many attractive women on this world, but there is something, something which makes some women not only attractive but beautiful. What is that? What makes a woman beautiful, and not just attractive? It’s love, straight and simple. Without love all women are the same. Why do I fall in love with certain women, and others not? I honestly can’t say.
You’d think I could, wouldn’t you, after all the years? But I still can’t. They still surprise me, these women, with their craziness and beauty. Often the craziness is part of the beauty. I sit next to it. I think: Jesus! She is so…! So! There is nothing that can replace those moments. Those are, for me, the moments where I’d give up everything. All she has to do is ask. Anything, I’d do it.
I know: I am a fool. At that moment, I am an utter fool. But what would life be without that foolishness? A worthless piece of shit. If I am not capable of loving her so much that I would do anything for her… then what is my life worth? If you can’t do it for love, for what then? For money, for fame, for power? Don’t make me laugh. For an ideal? But that is my ideal: love.
Of course, she has to smell good too.

Who said that? John Lennon, no wonder. „Its only the publishers who think it belongs to them.“
You know why? Well, you’re probably thinking about the artist’s right to make money from his work and so on. I can understand that viewpoint. But what you have to realize is this: I can take a song in my head, and play it for myself. Again and again. So who does it belong to then? Am I supposed to pay a percentage each time I listen to it in my head? Who is monitoring that? And when I make variations on it? When I improvise, based on the original, who does that belong to?
The same thing applies to any book I’ve read. When I think of passages from a book I’ve read, do I have to pay the author something for those thoughts? There are people who can repeat a book they have read page for page. When they repeat that, do they owe money to the author? When I write, I often paraphrase things I’ve read, or use the ideas presented there and go off on my own little tangent. Is that plagiarism?
I am sure you would agree it is not. The question is, where is the border? The second question is, who should decide where that border lies? I’ll say this much: I do not believe a lawyer, or a committee of lawyers, can decide the question.
Music can be so beautiful, it straightens your lopsided head right on out. It hits you between the eyes and pierces your brain like a white hot knife. It sends you floating on high, transported from this world. and then it hits you low down, below the belt. Man, it hurts, makes you cry out like you’ve been stuck with a knife, like a stuck pig… and you have been. Music twists on knobs you never knew you had. Music can turn you inside out. I wonder, can you write like that? No. No author ever wrote something that can twist me like that.
Listening to Tea with Cinnamon from Katzenjammer. This song reminds me of two women at once, and that kills me. Depends on the mood though. Sometimes I hear it and just think: yeah, yeah, skip it.
Music kills me anyway. There are songs I can hardly hear without crying. Not while they remind me of anything, necessarily, but because the music speaks with me. It is so beautiful, so poignant, that the tears just plain squirt. It isn’t sadness, but rather an overwhelming sense of deep feeling that forces me to cry. The tears may be of joy, or fear, of love lost… or found.
Once, many years ago, I was in the cathedral in Cologne, seeing the bloody sights. As chance would have it, there was an amateur choir of five men there, who happened to be visiting, and spontaneously, right next to me, they sang a chant they obviously knew well. Some kind of gregorian shit, y’know. I tell you, it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. It reverberated in those (holy) chambers in such a way that I burst instantly in to tears. I was in bliss, not because of God, God forbid, but because of the simple beauty of it. The beauty of their combined voices, those combined tones, in that incredible chamber.
The Germans say: he lives near water. Someone who cries easily „lives near water“. Well, I live near water, in certain situations, fucking badly damaged romantic that I am. Crash and burn, baby, crash and burn, says the little cynical bastard in me. It’s when you burn that you start to feel, and when you feel you realize you are alive, and that life is worth living. Life always begins in the ashes of death. So get up, and listen to some music. Listen to the tears. Listen to the water flow.
All those feelings… who do they belong to? Whose song is it, when you listen to it? Who wrote that song? Do you think those fellows in the cathedral knew what they did to me? Do you think they cared about making me pay for my experience? That is what John Lennon was talking about. He wanted to change the world, and that was all he cared about. He knew that every single person would make their own song out of what he created.
Listening to Come Together as rendered by the Butthole Surfers. But it doesn’t matter what I am listening to, really. The point is that I am listening.

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What did the Conquistadors drink? I mean, they probably ran out of wine on the cruise over, don’t you think?
Listening to Toiler on the Sea from The Stranglers, incidentally.
Did they drink water? Oh, my God.
I am reminded of W.C. Fields. I haven’t the slightest idea any more which film that was, but in essence he describes, horrified at the experience, the crossing of a desert: „Nothing to drink! Nothing but food and water for weeks!“
I am, at this very moment, drinking grog, as it was known to the British sailors of yore. A simple mixture of rum, lemon juice, and water. Alright, I admit it, I put two ice cubes in it, and so it is probably more refreshing than the British tar knew it, back in the day. Ice was, back then, an absolute luxury. But even then, without ice, it must have been quite good. You can put in as much water as pleases you, so it becomes a very light drink if you like it that way. I happen to like it that way at the moment, since I have to get up early tomorrow. Work. The nemesis of our everyday lives. On the other hand, if I didn’t have work, I’d be starving, and if I was starving I’d have to go find food, which would be, you guessed it, work.
Of course, then the results of my work would be immediately recognizable: berries, roots, grubs… can you imagine eating grubs? Do you even know what grubs are? Pupating insects, my friend. Squirming, wormlike things, quite large, if you are lucky. Very healthy, I have heard, if you can get them down. Read Tarzan, he ate grubs raw, and liked it, b’gad.
But the Tarzan we know from films and countless cartoons and god-knows-what-all is not the Tarzan as he was originally conceived. The „real“ Tarzan was an intelligent fellow, though he found grubs toothsome, not just a great warrior. He was not „Me Tarzan, you Jane.“ He knew six different languages, including that of the apes. He spoke fluent French, one of the most beautiful languages on this bloody world, and he was a gentleman in the most holy meaning of the word. The only thing he was not, was a poet. No poet warrior, I am afraid. He could have been though, if he hadn’t been so disgusted with humans and their so named civilization.
And he was right in that: being disgusted with human beings. A disgusting and hypocritical lot we are, generally speaking.
There is such a huge difference between what human beings say and what they do… such huge lies… that I have to hiccup and take another big swig of grog. I might even have to make myself a new grog, although I have to work tomorrow. But in spite of our horridness we do manage, occasionally, a nice thing or two. Out of our horridness grows a sort of beauty, when we manage to transcend ourselves.
There are three kinds of human beauty (oh hell, there are probably a whole bunch of kinds, but these are the ones I can think of just now).
The one is engendered by love of detail, love of patterns, love of nature: we see what nature offers, the immutable, infinite repetitions of nature. Physics, mathematics, they are often reflected in art and the artful crafts, and though they are far beyond my feeble intellectual powers, I have the feeling that the higher planes of physics and mathematics are more like art than science.
The second is the beauty of destruction. The barren beauty of death. Human beings understand that very well, though they can never reach beyond the barrier of death. Human beings can revel in devastation, in the stark silhouette of a spray of blood. They see the beauty inherent in such things. They know, though they often don’t admit it, that death engenders life.
The other is, in a sense, more transcendent. It is the sense of beauty which can not be explained. Beauty we do not understand, though we feel it: Love. We feel love, but we can never understand it. We see a man, or a woman, or we talk to them, or both, and we love. We don’t know why. We can try to explain it: the way they moved, the eyes, the incredible fragrance, what they said, something so full of wit and intelligence, or just the sound of their voice, something… but we will never really understand what it is. We just know that we are in love, and that is the greatest beauty of all. It’s a beauty we feel.